IT WAS the great medieval Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides who set out at length the biblical oddity of using human, embodied terms about God — variously depicting God, for example, as “speaking”, being “angry”, or as having a “face” (i.e. anthropomorphism). Curiously, given that this is such an erudite (perhaps excessively erudite) book, I could find no mention of Maimonides.
Less surprising for a very Catholic author — an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, still in his forties, at the Catholic Seminary and School of Theology of St Meinrad, Indiana — there is much mention of Aquinas and Balthasar, alongside Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and Cyril of Alexandria, and, more surprisingly, the radical, Lutheran New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann. The cover recommendation praises Professor (Chris) Hackett’s “evocative literary tropes”, but Church Times readers may be more daunted by his multiple digressions, stylised language, and heavy deployment of jargon.
Yet, once these linguistic barricades have been breached, there is a clear and, for me, convincing thesis: namely, that anthropomorphism — provided that it is not taken literally — is an important feature of language to depict personal realities that go beyond our understanding. This applies, especially, to divine reality, as well as, ironically, to the unknowable sentiments of much-loved household pets that are typically given human names.
Just as icons, rich in symbols, encourage Eastern Orthodox to worship God, so biblical parables and embodied stories, as well as differing ritual practices, enhance the worship of Christians of many different hues. Abstract conceptual language, Hackett insists, is quite simply insufficient: “We are not capable of any experience that is not (fully) human — theologians and philosophers included. Our experience, as an intellectual experience, is therefore determined [by] the perennial enigmatic dimensions of our humanity.”
For Hackett, anthropomorphism is emphatically personal language that contrasts sharply with atheistic nihilism: “Because for [the latter] the tribunal of human reason is absolute, indeed, and this is a human reason that possesses a specific character: unbelief. No truth is possible in the era of nihilism because nothing is believable any more. Not only the philosophical nihilist, but the person, the culture, the civilization under the sway of nihilism no longer believes anything requiring total self-consecration, except, I suppose, self-gratification itself.”
In contrast, “anthropomorphism would consider that there is a truth that may or may not exist but is essentially beyond the human capacity to know it. As the last word, anthropomorphism would understand the human form as exhaustive.”
In that sense, it is not just personal but also eschatological. The universe is finally seen as purposeful and personal, and God is seen, beyond all possible definitions, as personal divine presence: “The promise and hope in the definitive presence (and therefore enjoyment) that totally incorporates the historical and worldly dimensions of meaning, of absolute and particular, of eternity and time, of unity and multiplicity, and, in and through humanity, all things, is what gives meaning, so to speak, to meaning on the Christian account.”
This splendid conclusion makes struggling with Hackett’s prose well worth while.
Canon Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent.
Anthropomorphism in Christian Theology: The apophatics of the sensible
William C. Hackett
Bloomsbury £28.99
(978-1-350-359915-4)
Church Times Bookshop £26.09